Can people from the past ‘channel’ themselves into contemporary fiction?
Chrestomather'Tell me whom you haunt,' André Breton famously said, 'and I'll tell you who you are.' It's always disconcerting when a character or a scene in a novel turns…
Europe and the Fate of the Earth – Part 7 of 7
Where then can leadership on climate change come from? It is clear that it will come neither from the United States nor from 'emergent nations' like India, China and…
Europe and the Fate of the Earth – Part 6 of 7
For a century the West has held up its way of life as the standard of living to be aspired to by everybody. It was assumed that the…
Europe and the Fate of the Earth – Part 5 of 7
Why is there so little urgency in confronting climate change, a catastrophe that has already begun to affect millions of people? Imagine for a moment a contrasting situation:…
Europe and the Fate of the Earth – Part 4 of 7
We have all, to some greater or lesser degree, been confronted with the effects of climate change in our everyday lives: we have seen them in freakish floods,…
Europe and the Fate of the Earth – Part 3 of 7
3. From confluence to crossroads: we come now to a fork in the road that confronts not just Europe but our entire planet. In some ways the dilemmas…
Europe and the Fate of the Earth – Part 2 of 7
In the latter half of the 20th century European governments, often with the best intentions, responded to immigrants by providing support for what they saw as the…
Europe and the fate of the Earth – Part 1 of 7
1. Bengal, where I was born, is a vast delta where thousands of creeks and rivers flow into each other to form a landscape that is…
Sunil Gangopadhyay and his legacy
Sunil Gangopadhyay was a great writer and a warm, kind and generous man. I can scarcely believe that he is gone. Our interests overlapped in odd and sometimes…
M.V. Ramana on the Future of Nuclear Energy in India – Part 2 of 2
The most disturbing sections of M.V. Ramana’s Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India are those that relate to safety. Ramana describes two incidents that came…